Nobel laureate Dr. James D. Watson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In Forbes' "Love Only One" feature, which is returning after a long hiatus, we ask the biggest luminaries in different fields for their top picks in everything from stocks to gadgets. Here, we ask Nobel laureate James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and one of the first people to have his genome sequenced, to pick his favorite gene. From the May 21, 2012, issue of Forbes Magazine.
"One gene fascinates me: POMC, on chromosome 2, which is a recipe for a protein called pro-opiomelanocortin. In the body it gets broken up into different proteins, including melanotropin, which makes the skin darker when you’ve been in the sun, and beta-endorphin, a natural opioid that makes you feel satisfied after eating and also causes the ‘runner’s high.’ It’s the only gene I know whose very structure is an implicit biological message: Happiness is a reward for doing what we should be doing—for being in the sun and making vitamin D, for exercising and for bringing nutrients into our bodies. Eons ago these messages were delivered by the genes of our vertebrate ancestors on this planet. Now they are passed down to us.”
